 Welcome to a special talking business in front of a live audience at the World Economic Forum. They're debating whether diversity in the workplace matters. There's evidence that a more diverse board of directors results in greater dividends for shareholders and fewer bonuses for managers. If so, then how can organizations and countries make the most of it in order to generate a diversity dividend? I can't think of a better panel than this one to discuss the issues. Emery Slaughter. She's the Chief Executive of New America and a former U.S. State Department official who says that women can't have it all. Inga Beale, the first woman to become Chief Executive of Lloyds of London, she says that it's difficult, but women can break through. Guy Ryder is the Director-General of the International Labor Organization who says that the evidence for diversity stacks up. Beth Brooke, Global Vice-Chair for Public Policy at EY, formerly Ernst & Young, and the most senior openly gay female executive in the world. Bernard Tyson is the Chief Executive of Kaiser Permanente, one of America's largest healthcare firms and an advocate for diversity in the workplace. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming my panel. First, I'm just going to start off and ask the panel to share with the audience what the single most compelling piece of evidence that diversity does boost the bottom line is in their view. Guy. Well, let's answer that question, come to that question understanding that in the first place we're dealing with a rights issue. Equity, equality at work is about rights. But where's the business case? Well, the evidence really is there. And I think there's plenty of it on gender, the gender dimension of diversity. There is a wealth of evidence. The one I'm going to quote at you is survey work of Fortune 500 companies, returns to capital sales, just do better in companies which have more women on the board than those that do not have more women on the board. Another dimension, disability. You know, one billion people who suffer from one disability or another, that's a cost of 7% of GDP in the average country. So clearly, if you don't get these people at work with opportunities, there's an enormous social cost to society, as well as to individual companies. Emery. Thank you. So I'm going to give you some evidence, but I have to say, I do think women can have it all. We just need to make some huge changes, including the kinds of changes we're going to talk about on this panel. So I just do not want to be the poster card for women can't have it all. Women and men can have a great many things. We just need to make a lot of changes. Here's the data that I found most impressive. There are lots of people who think women have less appetite for risk. That men are the risk takers and you need risk takers, that's very important. So John Coates, who's a financial expert and a neuroscientist at Cambridge, has researched this extensively, including looking at how our brains work. And he says, that's not true at all. Men and women have an equal appetite for risk, but they approach it differently. Men love the sort of rapid reaction adrenaline of the trading floor, so they do it very fast. They assess the market and they take risk very fast. Women prefer to take more time to think about it. So they will take the risk in equal numbers, but they'll do it at a different time. Now, computers actually are likely to take the rapid reaction out of the trading game. So it doesn't matter if you take a little more time. And finally, his data shows women are better at long-term strategic thinking. So I'm just going to leave it to you, what does the world need more of? Rapid reactions or long-term strategic thinking? Inga. Yeah, I'm focused obviously on the financial services running an insurance market. And the financial services are pretty bad with senior women. We're way below some of the large public companies down at only 4%. And I just look back at the financial crisis and some of the criticism that was placed against the banks. And we all have heard about Lehman Brothers might have fared better if it was called Lehman Sisters. And actually, there has been a little bit of evidence to show that to have more women in top leadership positions, to have more women on boards, does improve corporate governance. So there's been lots of studies done around the world. One that caught my eye was done recently and it was done over a 10-year period in China. And they studied various companies and they showed that if you have women on the boards or even chairing boards in China, they are far less likely to commit fraud and they're far less likely to have security violations, regulatory violations. And so that really is evidence. I believe that having more women in top positions in financial services improves performance of companies. Thank you, Beth. Well, diversity is all about difference. And so there is study after study after study. It's hard to cite one that says that that difference matters to the bottom line. Companies perform better, teams perform better if they are diverse and inclusive. At EY, we actually wanted to prove it on our own data because all the studies were sort of academic. So we actually looked across 22,000 audit engagements from around the world. And indeed proved it on ourselves that gender-balanced teams outperform non-gender-balanced teams, both financially and in terms of quality. But Linda, I have to just say, let me take the consumer approach for just a second, which is if you have a diverse and inclusive work environment and you care about revenue, obviously, you're 158% more likely to understand your customer if you have a diverse and inclusive work environment. 158% more likely to understand your customer. And your customer, 12 women control 12 trillion out of the 18 trillion of consumer spending, and the LGBT population purchasing power is about almost $900 billion. So if you're 158% more likely to understand your women consumers and your LGBT consumers, you want a diverse and inclusive work environment. Thank you. Benid. Incredible power would have a diverse workforce, especially at the leadership level. In my experience, one of my responsibilities is to create the right environment where individuals can contribute. Quite frankly, some of the best solutions to the most complex problems that I've had to deal with in healthcare is when people are speaking their minds to the issues in front of us, both short-term and long-term. And I have benefited greatly from having a diverse perspective. What I am careful about is not to create a we-they one is better than the other, but how to bring and leverage the assets that everyone brings to the table. And for me, that's creating a level playing field. Secondly, I'm privileged to care for and cover the lives of almost 10 million people in America from all walks of life across the globe. I will be very short-sighted if I only had one particular group providing the leadership that's impacting 10 million very diverse populations. It doesn't fit in my formula, period. One statistic that I just read is an MIT study that found that if a business goes from being all female or all male towards gender equality, then revenues would rise by around 40%. So there seems like there's a lot of evidence in terms of why diversity could boost profits, could boost growth, improve the workplace, and yet this is still a topic that we're debating. So I just want to take a poll now of the audience, a show of hands. Do you think that it's down to discrimination that we don't see more diversity at the very top? A show of hands if you think that is the case. So maybe just under half of the audience thinks that. So let me come to you, Beth, on this. Just tell us a little bit about your personal story, because if there is a concern around discrimination, is that why it took you some time to decide that you would come out? First, I think it's more about unconscious bias than discrimination. I think that's it. But it had nothing to do with my decision to come out late in my career. I only came out three years ago, had nothing to do with discrimination or even a fear of it. I just thought my private life was my private life and that was really stupid. And I probably never would have just waved my hand and said, hey, look at me, I'm gay. I'm coming out now. I probably would never have done that. I was approached to be a straight ally on a video for the Trevor Project about it gets better. They were doing a campaign where companies would be speaking to gay teens at risk of suicide. And I was asked to be the straight closer on an EY video where LGBT people were going to tell their story about how life got better at EY for them. So I'm sitting on a plane reading the script about how life gets better, and I'm the straight ally closing the video, and it was so inauthentic. I'm like, I can't do that. I just can't do that. So after a glass of wine, I rewrote the script. All decisions are better after a glass of wine. But my message to the gay teens in that audience was for them to value their difference, that their difference mattered and that they should feel good about themselves because of their difference, not in spite of their difference. And that life did indeed get better. Benar, do you want to come in on this, please? Yeah, I share the view more around unconscious bias. A strong believer that we are in part products of our maps, our mental maps. Some of those maps goes back to childhoods or experiences around us. And we sometimes act that out in environments, and we're not aware of the behavior that has been exhibited. That on the other side comes in the form of discrimination and or stopping me from being at my full potential. And so I think it's real. I think that people like myself in roles like I'm in, part of my job is to pay attention to that and to call it. Part of my job is to go beyond the surface conversations and have the deeper conversations. Part of my job is to understand the different strengths and weaknesses in particular of the team around me to bring out the best in everyone. I am a role model of my own issues. And ironically, and it's a privilege sitting next to you, I had to go through a major thought process with the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community who taught me a lot about the issues of getting care in our collective environments and what they were experiencing. That knowledge base fundamentally influenced a set of decisions that I've made in the organization and decisions that we're going to make in the organization going forward. So it's real for everyone. I'm not sitting up here like I'm on a pedestal. It's real for all of us in terms of our own life experiences. But the reality is we're in roles in which we have to make decisions that impact millions of lives. So we have to step beyond ourselves to make that kind of contribution. You know what Bernard just described though is a great example of that 158% better understanding your customer. That reverse mentoring by your LGBT population contributed to your better understanding the customer. Yes. Inga, let me bring you in here. Can you just tell us a little bit about your path to the top and the assignment of the challenges that you experienced as a woman rising in the insurance industry? Yeah. Well, I'm going to also touch on the unconscious bias topic and I think a lot of people are already familiar with the introduction of the blind auditions for the orchestras back in the 70s and 80s when suddenly when they didn't know the gender of the person playing the instrument, recruitment of women shot up 50%. So there's, you know, this started a long time ago, this knowledge about unconscious bias. But I had a very important time in my life in the 90s. I found that and this was before I really knew about unconscious bias. I was very aware of it. I ended up hiring women. So I was a frontline. We were sort of a sales underwriting team and I ended up with five women. And it wasn't until somebody came in, one of the traders that we dealt with came in and said and started calling us the Spice Girls that I realized I thought, wow, what have I done here? Somehow I have ended up recruiting women and they're all like me and we become the Spice Girls. So then I learned about unconscious bias for myself, know a formal training about it. And since then I have done my utmost to make sure I have diverse teams. Can I get you to say a word about your rise to the top and how you've had to deal with a gender bias in your career? Well, I mean, I've been a pretty determined woman. There was a time in my career where I actually thought I couldn't make it and I did leave the industry and went off for a travel, a trip around the world where I was introduced to lots of different cultures. All that did for me was sort of make me feel empowered and say, well, I can do this. So I came back and it's really, I've just been very fortunate. I've taken opportunities. I've had the courage to go and do the most scariest things ever in my career and I've had the chance to move to all sorts of different countries and have a fantastic experience, which has then made me sort of eligible for the role I'm in now, which is running a sort of global insurance market. Emery, let me bring you in, but also allow you to elaborate on the having it all point for women. So I'm intrigued that you put this in the past tense. The bias I have experienced, because I agreed, open discrimination, not at all. I came onto the academic job market in 1990 where it was an advantage to be a woman. You had to meet the bar, but the Academy wanted to hire women professors and so if you met the bar and you were equal, you were more likely to get the job. So I've never experienced overt discrimination, but unconscious bias I experience all the time. I make my living in part as a public speaker on panels and often on television. If you did a analysis of how much I speak, anytime I'm on a panel with men versus how much they speak, you will always find that the men spoke more, that the men got a follow-up question and I often did not. The person who's doing the interviewing has no idea they're doing that and other women might notice and again it goes with others, but that unconscious bias. Or even here at the World Economic Forum, if I were here with my husband and we were wearing the same badge and we were meeting other people, many men, they would look at him first and assume he's the power player in this couple. And he often, when we do meet people, will say, my wife is actually more important. She's the one you want to talk to. And we make that assumption all the time when we see men and women. And it's there. It's there in a deep way. It's not deliberate, it's not bad. It's exactly, as you said, Bernard, I have my own biases. We all have our own biases, but we are better thinkers, better people, better business people if we're aware of them and we try to correct them. And just a word on having it all. I just want to say the title of my article was Why Women Still Can't Have It All, which is not a title I chose. But my point was simply that it was a long way to go before we really have created equal playing conditions or a level playing field for women who have caregiving responsibilities and who need to fit those together with their career. That's true for men, too. They're just fewer men with primary caregiving responsibilities. So that's what I meant. All right, God, I'm going to turn to you now. In terms of policies or workplace practices, listening to the panel, it sounds like unconscious bias is clearly something that still needs to be addressed. What, in terms of your looking at this issue in the workplace as the ILO, what single policy do you think would be most effective in trying to address this? But I think it depends what dimension of diversity we're looking at because the answer is different depending on what dimension you want to look at. And by the way, I think the point about us being very blind to our own unconscious biases is tremendously important. When you look at gender, the survey work we've done with enterprises on gender shows that they rate the biggest obstacle to progress to be childcare facilities. In the case of gender, there are structural labour market issues which are not attributable directly to discrimination or even unconscious bias. It's about policy issues that we just simply have to overcome and childcare comes top. What came bottom, by the way, was legislation and equality regulations. It seems like we've gone there and done it. That's not where the action is. On other dimensions, I just want to take up the LGBT, our own experience in a multicultural secretariat, an international organisation. We did a survey, it was just actually one year ago. We did an anonymous survey about our own staff's attitude to LGBT colleagues. Very interestingly, 90% of our respondents said, no problem working with an LGBT. Totally, totally comfortable. 80%, slightly less said, comfortable with having an LGBT colleague as a boss. And yet the LGBT respondents, only 61% felt that they were treated in a way which would make them feel comfortable. Very interesting difference in attitude on that. I just add the disability thing again because it is such a large part of the workforce. You know, there I think it really is mistaken attitudes, unconscious bias. Employers just do not believe until they try it that their workplace can be one in which a disabled person can give the sort of performance that they need. When they try it, they very quickly reverse their opinion. They're actually preferred colleagues, if I can say that. So, you know, variety of circumstances, variety of policy responses required. Yes. Your description rings really true, your percentages, yeah. And the unconscious, whether it's conscious, unconscious bias, I think it's interesting. I think it would surprise people to know that if your employees are still closeted, they are, so they're sitting there and they're 70% likely to leave the organization. So it's just, it's so important that they feel safe to be out, not just bias or bias, you know, whatever. They're looking up and gauging whether the water is safe to be out. If they see out-senior executives, like myself, the employee is 85% more likely to be out. It's how important out-senior executive role models are. And I heard Antonio Smose say earlier this week from HSBC said, you know, that's why there's very few senior out executives and it's why it is so important that we're visible because those employees in our workplace then feel so much more comfortable being out themselves. Well, Bernard, you've done a lot to promote diversity in the workplace. I'd like to hear from you in terms of what has really worked and if you've drawn on your own experiences to develop those policies. I think, you know, I can relate you very much to how do you continue to make sure that the senior most team is walking the talk, is setting the environment of expectations and creating, I call it at Kaiser Permanente, the spirit of the freedom of speech, that people know they can speak their peace, they can be who they are and then figure out how we bring all that uniqueness into a synergetic way that we produce value for our members. So I view it as part of the business proposition and for me, the full potential comes from people coming to work being who they really are and making their contributions. So and I have to admit that some of this comes from personal experience. The fact of the matter is there aren't many from a domestic United States standpoint African-American men in positions like myself, CEO of a 55, 58 billion dollar company. I have had to go through many evolutions that I think for me that came to a peak when I realized that I was personally stressing myself out too much trying to be who I wasn't and I was determined that I was going to be who I am. And I'll never forget someone that told me years ago, and I share this all the time, he said, you know, part of your problem is you're trying to play by the rules and you need to have an attitude of helping to write the rules. And that lesson went with me and is with me to this day. And so what I try to do is create an environment from my lessons learned where people come to work having an attitude and a feeling that I can do something about this environment to produce greater value. And there is nothing more powerful to me than having in front of me someone who can represent the best interest of understanding the nuances of some of our diverse customers at the senior most level when we're about to make critical decisions on behalf of this organization. Emory, can I come to you in terms of when we're talking about these practices, these issues, should there be more affirmative action programs to raise diversity in the workplace? So I think from what we're talking about gender diversity, I agree the most important is actually childcare and paid family leave and a way to fit your career and your caregiving together again for women and men. If I were going to look at affirmative action, it would be for a different population. It would be for women who are in their early 50s who dropped out of the workforce or took part-time jobs and were certainly out of the leadership track while they were taking care of their families or taking care of their parents. There is a huge reservoir of talent out there, right? Those are all the same women that got all the same degrees as the women that went ahead. They have all the same credentials. They didn't actually lose their minds taking care of children. They simply gained a number of things. That's a tool of a reservoir of talent. Most of those women can expect to work till they're 75. I mean, if Hillary Clinton runs and wins, she'll be 70 when she's president and Janet Yellen is 67. So they've got 20 to 25 years ahead of them. That's the affirmative action I would make. It is to say hire those women and just watch how talented they are and how hungry they are and how ready they are to pour themselves back into their careers. Whereas we basically think, well, if you opted out in your 30s, sorry, you're out till you're 70. That's insane, or 80, or however long you live. Inga, can I bring you in on this? Because obviously this debate around women and around quotas always raises issues around tokenism, around some of the broader challenges of making this kind of policy. What is your take on affirmative action of some sort? Yeah, so I suppose I am my age and I am in my 50s now. I've been working in insurance for way over 30 years, actually. And I suppose I just sort of look around and I look at how many women started in the industry when I did. And I sort of look and I don't see them there anymore. I don't know what happened to many of them, but they're not there. And so I sort of think, gosh, how long is it going to take to really make a difference and have more women in the senior roles in particularly in financial services? So I am actually supportive of some affirmative action to have some targets and to try and achieve them. But for me personally, what I focus much more on is really to be very much a role model. And I noticed this particularly when I took over as CEO of a publicly quoted insurance company in Switzerland. And prior to that, I'd worked outside of the country and I didn't realize that I would suddenly become the novelty of the Swiss media in that I was the first female CEO in Switzerland of a financial services company. This was some years ago. And the response from a lot of the females in Switzerland was, please, this is fantastic. You can be our sort of shining light. You can do great stuff for women. So I felt an enormous pressure on me to actually sort of take a stand and be a bit of a role model. And that's what I try to do from a personal perspective. OK. Bernard, affirmative action, of course, has been hotly debated in the United States for many, many decades. So come in on this issue. Is this something that other countries should be thinking about? Do you support it in the United States? Yeah, I mean, I agree with the answer. If you look at where we have made progress or not, you have to ask yourself, what else is needed to move the needle? I think that the reality is we tend to believe that there's a, quote, totally fair and objective process. And yet you hear over and over again when the final decision making is occurring, all the soft stuff starts to rule the day. So I believe, and there's this mass confusion at time that says I'm giving someone a leg up and they're unqualified for the role. And so there needs to be clarification, which is part of the misunderstanding that someone else was more qualified and someone else was unqualified. Both applicants hit that mark of qualifications. The issue is then, based on other factors, why would you make this decision versus the other? And the debate, quite frankly, is a normal debate. I've had them, you've had them, we've all had them. It goes something like this. Well, I think you should go with Joe because he's more friendly. He gets along with everyone. The chemistry worked between the two of us. And so to sit there and say, I think we should go with Bernard because he represented a unique point of view that we don't have at this table right now is as much of a legitimate reason for selecting Bernard over Joe as any other legitimate discussion. So part of it is how you demystify what affirmative action is all about. And unfortunately, it has been used in a more divisive manner. And so you hear the interpretation of what it means and in particular, it gets interpreted at times that you have hired an unqualified person, meaning they did not meet the minimum qualifications to effectively do the job. I think one thing that you touched on it and we don't talk enough about is when we're making decisions on a promote or a hire, we talk about it in terms of a single decision for that single individual versus thinking about that decision with the mosaic that you're creating and that's what you touched on. And you have to make an individual decision but also a mosaic decision for the team that you're creating. And if we viewed decisions in that way, I think we'd have better results. Beth, isn't there a danger, though, of tokenism? Is there a danger? Is there a concern that if you use affirmative action policies, you could end up with a one representative and they get promoted. The perception is that they're promoted not on merit but because they're the token representative. My answer was not in the context of affirmative action. My answer was in the context of I firmly believe in diverse teams and the value of a diverse team. And so the functioning as the research indicates of that team, if it's well led, it will outperform. That MIT research that you cited was comparing a group of top IQs much higher than the group they were competing against and yet the diverse team was outperforming them. So forget about the affirmative action in the tokenism. You got to focus on that mosaic that you're creating. I'll look at that issue for a second because we all hire ourselves, right? You just said that we all hire ourselves. We look at someone and they look, you can assess how talented they are because you're thinking about how talented you are. So actually, come on, I sat on law school hiring committees forever and I would hire the sort of non-traditional candidate who had done different things because that's what I was like. The people who'd gone through a certain training and done this, they'd hire themselves. So the point is once you diversify your team, you're not going to have tokens. You're actually going to see it and you said it. You weren't thinking about it. You were just hiring women because they seemed really great candidates to you. So I think once you break in, you will find a readier and wider pool of candidates that everyone will hire. And of course, they say the magic number is three. So you don't want to end up with just one person who's the different one. They say the magic number is three and if you have three, then you have enough mass to actually make a difference and for that voice to be meaningful. Have you worried about tokenism in your career, Inga? Actually, I haven't ever worried about it and I think if I ever was hired because I was a woman, I would think, great. Now I'm going to show them what I can do. Bernard, have you ever worried about tokenism? I was happy to get the job. I was happy to get the pay and I was happy to be at the table. No, because I really mean that. You know, I didn't because, one, I assume that throughout my career, the person wasn't doing me a favor and they were expecting top performance. But I have also experienced in my career sponsorship in which, which is different from mentoring in which a sponsor used some personal collateral of the sponsor to say, no, he is absolutely qualified, capable and should be given a chance. And so I have been fortunate in terms of the setup for my responsibilities throughout my career but I've never felt that I was the token. I just wouldn't let the mindset work that way as a token of something around the table. Right, very quickly, before we open it up to Q&A, I'd like to just go around the panel and ask you, what would be your measure of success for greater diversity? What kind of benchmark are we talking about? Is it gender parity? Is it racial parity? Is it LGBT parity? Is it reflective of society? What would you say would be success? Guy. All of that, everything you just said. But if I could pick a couple. OK. And just to go back to sort of real politics in all of this, you know, G20 last year, cut the gender participation gap by 25% by 2025. That's 100 million more women at work. That would be nice. In our member states, 185 of them, there are twice as many countries which make same-sex activity illegal than recognised same-sex marriages or partnerships. It'd be nice to reverse that. Beth. I like things you can touch individually and make happen. So I would say where our work environments are all where our employees feel valued for their difference, not in spite of their difference. Because then we would know everybody is engaged, productive, happy, and bringing all their potential into the workplace. Bernard. For the workforce where everyone feels that they share in the ownership of the success of the enterprise and that they come to work not thinking about who they are but what they can contribute. For the outside, it's 9.5 million members, 9.8 million members looking inside of the organisation and saying, you get it. Because I see myself inside of your organisation. Emory. So I run an organisation called New America. Success for me is when my organisation looks like America rather than like old America. So it really does reflect the changes in the population rather than the sort of white elite policy world of Washington. Inga. Yeah, and being in the finance industry and numbers oriented, I would like some numbers around it. I would focus very much on measuring the financial services industry's success and I would love that 4% that we have at the moment of senior women in executive positions and board positions in financial services match the average or go up to what I think is the current figure for the rest, which is 19%. So I'd like us to have that parity there. I think I saw a headline, a study of women in the city and the headline was sexism in the city. Quite a clever headline. OK, anyways. Can I now please open it up to the audience? Remember, there's a microphone coming to you. We'll gather a few questions. Please stand up, smile for the camera, say who you are, who you're with and who you like the question to be answered by. Gentleman here in front and then lady here in front and the lady in the second row. And then I'll come over here. Thank you. Stephen Cross with AOM PLC. The financial services industry, I'm in the insurance industry. So my question is directed to Inga and to Bernard. The 4% in Lloyds of London reminding ourselves that the first female underwriter was only ever allowed into Lloyds in London in 1970. How can we 4% in London? And I know having lived in the US for quite some time Bernard, I think the statistics would be far higher in the US than they are in the UK. Inga, do you think that's something that's just industry specific, London specific? I just love your observations on it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hi, Alexis Miguel Johnson. I run the Perception Institute, which is actually a group of social psychologists who work on unconscious bias among other things. So I was really pleased to hear of the uniformly everyone talking about it. I wanted to... We understand that unconscious bias is not a silver bullet. It's very difficult to challenge unconscious bias in many ways that there's anxieties and stereotype threat that actually affect our performance. So I'm wondering how do you open up your teams to the fact that they may hold these biases and they may have to address them? Thank you. Next question in the second row. The lady there. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Hausser-Strand. I'm the founder and CEO of Bill Change. I'm a Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur. And I've heard some CEOs say this week that the trigger for them in prioritizing gender diversity in their workplace was when they had a daughter. And I have a two-and-a-half-year-old son and I'm just so thrilled that he refers to the animals in his books as she. So what else can we do from this age, from that young age to reduce this unconscious bias? So it doesn't take until we're 30 or 40 years old before we prioritize diversity. And I'll take my answer from anyone who wants to address it. Shall we go to Inga first? Yes, sure. So I've had the opportunity also of working in the US and for a big American firm. And I would say the big difference that I've noticed between that and what we have in Lloyd's and the London insurance market is that there were affirmative actions, policies in place in that company. You had to record and measure how many women you had, what your ethnic makeup was of your teams. You had to show that you were promoting fairly across all of the different groups. And in Lloyd's and in the London market we haven't traditionally had any of those such policies within firms. I think we need a bit more of that as well as obviously some behavioral changes that need to take place in this sort of traditional city environment that we still have. Emery? I want to take on the last question about what do we tell our boys since I have two sons who are 16 and 18. And I'm going to say something different than you expect. I think the best thing we can tell our boys is that they can support their wives or their partners in many different ways with either cash or care. If you look at the 19% women or the 4% women, a third to a half have a husband who is the lead parent or the primary caregiver. I'm certainly an example. I couldn't be sitting here if my husband weren't willing to be the one who's at home when something happens or somebody calls. So we need to, if we really want our women to have parity look at all the male CEOs and their spouses are the primary caregiver or the lead parent. It doesn't mean they don't work. It means they are the lead. So really, we have to tell our boys, you know what? You are just as much a man. In fact, you are a brave and courageous man if you are willing to actually support your wife's career by providing care rather than providing cash. Bernard? Hi. The number in the affirmative action program, et cetera. I think it's needed and necessary because it gets down to the numbers and the accountability is straight line for me. The challenge I see though is it slows the progress of the environment at times. Meaning, I'm now thinking mentally how do I comply? An environment of compliance versus commitment. Two very different kinds of scenario to work in. But once you get enough of the numbers in, I'm absolutely convinced and have seen it that you start to deal with the commitment piece coming into play much more, which brings out the more energy and the biggest potentials of individuals making the best contributions possible. But numbers are important and tie in numbers of individuals is also very important as well. I'm struck by the question on unbiased having those kind of conversations because I've actually been a part of two environments within my organization growing up in my organization. One where it didn't work with the team and where it worked. When it didn't work it was a very political environment where everybody was at the table to protect their territory and no one was going to give up any information that would later be used against them. And it was a disaster. And you can tell it and it was a difference between talking in the room and when you went to the restroom and then really say they will not get anything out of me today. Versus an environment where you feel like you're a part of a team to produce the performance of what you're committed to the organization. And in that context with professional help helping to bring it out I felt it was very effective. So may I just add something to that because I think there's in the future right now actually we're really looking for slightly different leadership traits I think to what we had in the past. We used to think of leaders as arrogant sort of dominant cunning you know and now we're looking generally for more feminine traits in leaders and this could be this is around a lot of teamwork so women tend to be more collaborative and want teamwork. They tend to be viewed as much more trustworthy and authentic which opens up the environment to be able to talk about things much more and I think that is a general trend that people are changing to have more feminine a better balance between masculine and feminine traits in leadership. You can go on my twitter site I actually tweet meals that I cook. I'm dead serious right and I'm bringing out the more sensitive side to myself. It's amazing the conversation that goes on as a result of that. Beth just very quickly on unconscious bias what's the best way to address that? Well let me address that for the LGBT community because I think it's something we haven't talked enough about and that is the importance of allies which is it's important that we have out senior leaders but then the environment needs allies and we don't talk enough about the fact that there's sort of passive allies all the way to very proactive and visible allies so there's you know hang the rainbow flag on the door or put the mug on your desk not sufficient but there needs to be but I don't think we talk enough about this in part because allies are uncomfortable and being proactive can be very scary I know right after I came out three years ago I'm gay and I felt this horrendous sort of pressure to get it all right like I knew I was supposed to know how to talk the language and what to say I've been closeted for 52 years I was as scared as anyone I can only imagine how our allies feel which is afraid when we came out our chairman at the time would sort of step in it every day with me saying something that was just sort of really but it was blesses hardy was talking about it and we were talking and learning and getting better so we need to help our allies I think we have to have dialogue to help them be more proactive because it is just so important and that really does help I think with the unconscious bias another round of questions there was a lady in front so come to her to pick up the question and then I'm going to call on Antonio Simoes who's right there and I expect a statement Antonio not just a question for you he's the chief executive of HSBC and a very prominent chief executive and just did a panel as Beth said on LGBT issues but please ladies first thank you, Laura Liswood council of women world leaders there's been some terrific statistics here there's been another one which was in Australia 72% of senior executive men agreed with the statement that great progress had been made in women's development career development 72% agreed with that statement senior executive men 71% of senior executive women disagreed with that statement which tells you that dominant groups are living in the world and non-dominant groups and you referenced the issue of once someone went through the experience of being differently abled it changed their mind immediately and since we're looking for some immediate solutions to these issues how do we actually get people to live in other people's worlds well I'd like to trade places with you Antonio thank you Linda so first instead of the comment I'd like to actually congratulate everybody because personal reflection I don't think it's easy to be a role model a lot of people believe that being a role model is just being yourself I think being a role model is standing for something that you believe in Tim Cook's words to put your brick in the wall of history so I think you're putting that brick in the wall of history so thank you for being here today I do have a question Linda if I'm allowed of course unconscious bias and my concern particularly as a gay man leading an organization is what are the dimensions that I don't see today so what are the dimensions of diversity that I'm not seeing today so I guess the question for you is what are those areas particularly the ones that are not visible you're talking about disability earlier I talk a lot about mental health I actually equate it to coming out as gay man because mental health for most people is something that's not visible so what are those frontiers of diversity that are not represented here today and that we as leaders even the ones that defend diversity are not aware of I think the gentleman in front of you also had a question take that and then we'll go to the panel thank you very much well I would like to tell you that you have to create a woman's world and this woman world can only be structured provided who are very enjoying their senior executives in various banks in India we have 50% of the banks the CEOs are women I remember the gentleman once he had all his board members were women so I told him how is that you have kept all the board members are women he said because I have faith and I have confidence and I see their talent and their IQ is better than the man so today the same women who are on the board members are the CEOs of the 50% of the banks in India so I would suggest that you successful woman in the world unless you don't create a woman world the encouragement and the inspiration to the students in the universities in colleges they should prepare themselves from the inception that they have to make their future career and this can only happen provided a big revolution comes in and every country has a title of the woman world and that is my niece she is now talking in the United Nations creating a woman world and giving a plan to everybody and I talked to Madame Christine Lagar as well thank you very much please create a think tank of 20 good women so that they can prove to the world that women has a great talent open into the panel so I'm going to disagree with the last statement and it's going to go back to the beginning when you said how many people believe that lack of diversity is due to discrimination so yes, there's discrimination out there, we've all talked about it unconscious bias, absolutely but I think you can inspire all the young women you want in fact in the high schools that my sons goes to the women are outperforming the men they're outperforming the boys unbelievably and that is true across the United States and that's true in college and that's true in professional school so it is not and that's not true around the world in many countries we have that problem but in developed countries the problem is not that women don't think they can do it the problem is not that they don't have role models the problem is when their caregiving responsibilities hit right, that they're going everything's great and then they have that first child second child and suddenly even if they take advantage of flexibility policies when they come back in they're no longer on leadership track and then they're not getting good jobs and so at some point and it's just too hard and at some point then they opt out or they take part time jobs and then they're no longer in the pool to be leaders so I don't want to deny the reality of discrimination but if we think that the problem is just inspiring women we are not addressing that moment that all those wonderful women you started with but in financial services we do have a slight issue in terms of attracting talent because in the top, if you look at the students our students there's a difference in perception of financial services between male and female and one of the thing the big, the top five descriptors for financial services that female students have is aggressive they think the industry's aggressive and they're put off from even joining it and so we do have a different perception depending on the gender of the financial services industry so I agree with you but my students many of them at Princeton and places like that they look at financial services and they think you want to have a career in a family forget it they don't believe that that's a career that will allow them to combine the two so you know whereas doctors for instance you have your own practice you can control your hours you got women flooding into medicine so I agree both things are true it's aggressive but it's also people are self-selecting out of careers that they don't think they can mix the two we're quickly running out of time but let me bring a guy and you have to answer all the questions very quickly this issue of submerged areas of unconscious bias these things that exist but we don't really see them but we know they're there I think it's really important and I'll just give one example I'm obliged by the rules of my organization to try to form multi-cultural management teams and to bring people from different cultures up into teams when it gets to the time to choose it doesn't work because there's an automatic tendency of a manager from a certain culture to prefer somebody from the same culture and the problem is it's because organizations require a way of thinking to produce results whatever you come from there's a sort of what a French called a pense unique we've all got to do it the same way and to form a team that does it the same way you need people who look and behave the same so somehow you've got to break that down and I don't know how you do it but I think it relates to that very difficult question that's been put which I think is something we've got to come to in the future but it is human nature that's exactly that's human nature and you're exactly right we have to counter human nature we just did a research study at EY that I really thought was interesting men women 400 leaders and the men identified for women's advancement to be unconscious bias among men among their fellow men so at least we're starting to fight the battle with recognition which is the key point we're out of time but I'm just going to go around at the panel very quickly you've talked a lot about these issues I'm sure in your career lots of events publicly privately was there something which is you would take away from today's session that perhaps is new to you or struck you in some way it's gonna you have to do it in 10 seconds sound bites I'm afraid I think the idea of looking at the incredible talented women who stepped out of the work environment raised their families it might be wanting to come back in really struck me great but we need so much more dialogue on these issues guy long way to go but we have come a long way you really have I'm gonna be I'm challenged by how do we make people understand how other people are feeling I'm gonna take that challenge on and work out how can do that I take away that we all need to think more about where is our bias because we're very good if you're a woman pointing out male bias I'm now I'm left thinking what are my biases and who am I not giving an equal shot to it's we're out of time but that was an absolutely terrific panel a huge thank you to my guests Emery Slaughter, Inga Beale, Guy Ryder, Beth Brooke and Bernard Tyson diversity in the workplace can pay dividends but there is some way to go to fully understand how best to promote and support a diverse workplace I'm sure this is the first of many conversations to be had about the diversity dividend for now that's all we have time for thanks very much to our audience as well as to the World Economic Forum for more on talking business check out our website and me on Twitter on that Linda you and join us next time for more talking business with me Linda you